If I tell you what I want you won't be engaged or excited. Also, I may not tell you the right thing -- it may not play to all your strengths or what you are interested in right now.
If I tell you what the company goals are and our teams goals, and then ask you how you can use your unique talents to help us achieve those goals, you'll be much more engaged in the work, and also have a greater understanding of how your work fits into the rest of what your team and your company is doing.
I firmly believe cooperative talented people can self-manage and drive vision better than any top-down authority. I can understand it won't work with people that go to work just for money though.
My boss has told me more than once that his goal is to get the people under him to fill the role he's currently filling as our direct manager. This is, according to him, the only way he can move upward. He currently does a decently large amount of work for us as a team, but he's trying to shift that work onto us, because as you're pointing out here, cooperative and talented people can indeed self-manage.
The problem he encounters is when that doesn't work out because no group is perfect, and frankly we're probably not ready to manage ourselves quite yet.
But I think you're onto something here, and I also think every one of the managers who wrote READMEs in this submission would agree with you. From a logistical standpoint, someone has to attend all those meetings with other teams, with the leaders of the company to hear what they're thinking and translate it for the rest of the engineers, and make sure the boring stuff like vacation time, sick leave, etc. are being looked after.
It's not really about being in charge/calling shots, it's about taking a group of talented and smart people, and making sure they're getting the info they need to keep build cool stuff.
> It's not really about being in charge/calling shots
I believe, admittedly based only on personal experience and anecdotal evidence, that this attitude is shared by a vanishingly small minority of managers, at least in practice.
Even the manager you mentioned referenced "the only way he can move upward" which implies even he ultimately wants to be in charge or call the shots in some hierarchical system, or am I reading too much into it?
I don't need a manager. Just tell me what you want and I'll make it for you without anyone messing up with my productivity. Thank you!